“[T]he Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser said the survey’s methods were “close to best practice” and the study design was “robust”.”

Well, so far what we know – only a few people ever disagreed with that and they were discredited, insane or (usually) both.

Talking of which, here’s the Prime Minister’s Official Smokescreen from just after publication (12/10/2006):

“more important was the view of the Iraqi government, which, as recently as October, had said that the Lancet report numbers method was far from the correct. The Iraqi health ministry was the place to get the relevant figures. The problem with this was that they were using an extrapolation technique, from a relatively small sample, from an area of Iraq which was not representative of the country as a whole. We had questioned that technique from the beginning and we continued to do so. The Lancet figure was a greater order of magnitude than of any other figure. It was not one we believed to be anywhere near accurate.”

In short, a strong case of cognitive dissonance, given that the BBC’s FoIA request now reveals that they were being told internally that the method was sound *at the time* (well, the day after, on the 13th).

We know Blair and the other inmates of the Fuhrerbunker are unscientific – the faith schools/evolution argument and the technical/engineering illiteracy over ID cards and NHS IT give it away – but this is cast-iron proof – one of the tests of good scientists is not discarding eye-opening results merely because to do so risks having your eyes opened.

Hi Jon, thanks for this interesting link! I will add it to my RSS feeds; and hope that it will not overload my RSS reader (I have some 400 RSS feeds; I read about someone with 1200 or more. But somehow, my RSS reader seems to get in trouble if if I add “too many” feeds).